Mark Shuttleworth Says Mir Is Running Faster than X

The founder of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, has chronicled his experience with the Mir display server, after having using it for a couple of weeks.

There is no doubt that Canonical has attracted a lot of attention and criticism with its decision to develop its own display server, Mir, and replace the current choice for Ubuntu, which is X.

In order to gain some traction, the Mir display server must have some serious backing and there is no one better for the job than Mark Shuttleworth.

Canonical's founder has explained that he's using Mir for a couple of weeks already and that he feels that it's faster than X.

“Mir has been running smoothly on my laptop for two weeks now. It’s an all-Intel Dell XPS, so the driver stack on Ubuntu is very clean, but I’m nonetheless surprised that the system feels *smoother* than it did pre-Mir.

“It might be coincidence, Saucy is changing pretty fast and new versions of X and Compiz have both landed while I’ve had Mir running. But watching top suggests that both Xorg and Compiz are using less memory and fewer CPU cycles under Mir than they were with X handling the hardware directly,” Mark Shuttleworth stated on his blog.

He also acknowledged the fact the Canonical has taken a lot of flak for all their decisions, but, in the end, everything has been done for users’ sake.

“On Ubuntu, we’re committed that every desktop environment perform well with Mir, either under X or directly. We didn’t press the ‘GO’ button on Mir until we were satisfied that the whole Ubuntu community, and other distributions, could easily benefit from the advantages of a leaner, cleaner graphics stack,” said Shuttleworth.

There is no precise date for the availability of Mir, as Canonical only specified that it would arrive as a default option of Ubuntu 13.10. Nonetheless, Mir might arrive a little earlier, during the development phase and it will be available through the daily snapshots of Ubuntu.